Events Journal-isms Roundtable

Journal-isms Roundtable, 2013 and earlier

Revisedlogo.JournRndtbl4 (1)December 2013

E.R. Shipp, Tori Mend-Cole and Ericka Blount Danois at the December holiday party. (Credit: Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)
E.R. Shipp,  left, Tori Mend-Cole and Ericka Blount Danois at the December holiday party. (Credit: Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)

4th Annual Journalists Roundtable Holiday Party: We heard from Ericka Blount Danois, author of “Love, Peace and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America’s Favorite Dance Show ‘Soul Train’: Classic Moments.”  < http://on.fb.me/1c1B0AB >

November

Dan Lothian, CNN White House corespondent November 2008-October 2013 < http://bit.ly/2romHm0 >.

October

With Eric Deggans on his first day as television critic for NPR. < http://on.fb.me/1bAEHKr >

September

Vanessa K. Bush, named Essence editor-in-chief on July 31, came down from New York to meet with us. She has been at the magazine for 10 years. < http://on.fb.me/14wtXgw >

August

Frank Sesno, director of the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs and former CNN Washington bureau chief, and his newly hired faculty members, Imani Cheers and  Cheryl Thompson; and Gracie Lawson-Borders, new dean of the School of Communications at Howard University. < http://bit.ly/2IdUUyv >.

July

Corey Dade, who covered the Trayvon MartinGeorge Zimmerman case for the Root.  < https://n.pr/2jxTqAX > His presentation was so riveting, “nobody seemed ready to leave.” < http://on.fb.me/12bUbUt >

June

Donna Brazile, Democratic political strategist and commentator for CNN and ABC News’ “This Week.” < http://on.fb.me/1auRIH8 >

May

Matt Thompson and Keith Woods of NPR update on the NPR race relations initiative. Congratulating Jackie Jones, named chairman of the Department of Multi-Media Journalism in Morgan State University’s new School of Global Journalism and Communication and Yamiche Alcindor, named NABJ “Emerging Journalist of the Year .” Alas, no photos.

April

Jacquie Jones, executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium, and Glennwood Branche, VP news operations at ABC News. The group discussed the mistakes made during television coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. < http://bit.ly/2wiLhtD >.

March

Toasting Shirley Carswell as she retires as deputy managing editor at the Washington Post. < http://bit.ly/2roBIn2 >.

February

Kevin Merida, newly promoted managing editor of the Washington Post. < http://bit.ly/2jxxzK6 >

January

Paul Farhi, media writer at the Washington Post, Andrew Beaujon of the Poynter Institute (no photos)

2012

Rachel Swarns at the December 12 holiday party. (Credit: Sharon Farmer/sfphtoworks)
Rachel Swarns, center, in blue, at the December 2012 holiday party. (Credit: Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)

December 2012 holiday party

Rachel L. Swarns of the New York Times discussed her book, “American Tapesty: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama.” < http://bit.ly/2K0tSYj >

November

Congratulating Ken Strickland, newly named D.C. bureau chief for NBC News. (no photos)

Lifelong Washingtonian Don Graham, recounts Washington Post lore at Mio's Restaurant., including Janet Cooke, the Pentagon Papers an the racist history of the Washington Redskins. (Photo: Jason Miccolo Johnson)
Lifelong Washingtonian Don Graham recounts Washington Post lore at Mio’s Restaurant., including  tales of Janet Cooke, the Pentagon Papers and the racist history of the Washington Redskins. (Photo: Jason Miccolo Johnson)

October

We thanked Don Graham, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Co., for his generosity in helping us honor Bill Raspberry, the former Washington Post columnist, with a benefit and roast three weeks before Bill’s death in June, and again after Bill’s passing. < http://bit.ly/2ro6ahh >

September

Matt Thompson and Keith Woods on NPR’s new race relations journalism initiative. < http://bit.ly/2jAyoBC >

August

Wayne Bennett, who writes the “Field Negro” blog, drives down from Philadelphia. He’s active in the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and deals with the state of urban families in his 9-to-5 job as a magistrate for the first Judicial District’s Domestic Relations Division. He also has his own private criminal defense practice.

July

Keith Clinkscales comes down from New York to discuss his new ventures, which include Shadow Mediaworks, a sports web site eventually called the Shadow League. Keith has been senior vice president for content development and enterprises at ESPN, chairman and CEO at Vanguarde Media and president and CEO of Vibe/Spin Ventures. Marissa A. Evans, a Marquette University student, joins. In 2013, she would become Student Journalist of the Year for the National Association of Black Journalists. We congratulate Mark S. Luckie on his new job as Twitter’s new creative content manager for journalism, based in New York. Also, Kim Barrington Narisetti, a
freelancer who now writes children’s books through her company Urban Crayon Press.

May

Kevin S. Lewis, director of African American media at the White House, and Luis Miranda, director of Hispanic media. We raised a glass to Latoya Peterson and her Knight fellowship and congratulated Chris Jenkins on being named editor of theRootDC at the Washington Post.

(second May roundtable)

Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, sounded an alarm that we are sliding backwards on issues of black and Latino children’s welfare, and that the news media are not giving this sufficient attention..

April

Gary Knell, new CEO of NPR. He wrote us afterward, “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed our discussion and dinner last night. I really walked away energized by our conversations and inspired to aim higher. It was such an impressive group. I hope you’ll invite me back soon!”

March

David Scott, vice president, news, BET, and three others from BET (Marie Nelson, producer; Deborah Creighton Skinner, managing editor, news, digital media; and Tara Jones, VP for public affairs. Marie and Tara are DC-based. BET shipped in advance DVDs of its best work, compiled for us, and three copies of its four hours of Whitney Houston funeral coverage.

February

Reception with Skye Dent’s students at Fayetteville State University, N.C.,  and D.C. alumni, at Paolo’s Georgetown, 1303 Wisconsin Ave. NW.

January

Howard Mortman, communications director at C-SPAN.

2011

December holiday party

Three authors discussed their new books: Joseph Torres, co-author with Juan Gonzalez of “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media”; Amy Alexander, author of “Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention”; and Harriet A. Washington, who wrote “Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself — and the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future.” < http://on.fb.me/sdFp7N >.

November

David Leonhardt, new Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, a luncheon

October

We were joined by Hubert H. Humphrey fellows at the University of Maryland: Joonji Mdyogolo, who has been deputy editor and managing editor at O, the Oprah Magazine for South Africa;  Paulo Rogerio Santos, founder and executive director of the Ethnic Media Institute in Salvador, which focuses on issues of race, ethnicity, development and media justice; and Zvikomborero Zimunya  of Zimbabwe, who is working on the Ushahidi Zimbabwe project to use crowd-sourcing mobile applications to track political violence and other emergencies.

September

Michael Eric Dyson, Georgetown sociology professor, author and host of “the Michael Eric Dyson Show” on public radio; and Teshima Walker, executive producer of “Tell Me More” on NPR.  Dyson was funny and engaging, and shared inside information gleaned from his relationship with Obama (he was one of the first to support
him). Among topics discussed: Why Jackie O. was mad at MLK: Obama and Cornel West, (that incident demonstrated that Obama hasn’t lost his blackness, when he got into Cornel’s face in public and said, “is that
all you got? that you didn’t get a ticket?”) Henry Louis Gates incident, the backlash to “acting stupidly” made Obama retreat from ever talking again about race, and that’s closed off the subject for the rest of us. Bill Clinton could talk about it more because he’s white. Scolds journalists for opposing Sharpton on MSNBC because he’s
not a journalist. Cites the other MSNBC hosts who are not journalists.

Dysaon was hungry, but it served him well to eat as much as he did while Teshima Walker was talking. Once he got going, there was no stopping him. He’s only on six (?) stations.

Teshima said it was extremely rare for a black show to arrange for syndication within public radio, so Dyson and Lafontaine Oliver are to be congratulated. Public radio vet Jim Asendio stressed the importance of letting
NPR know whenever you like something someone black has done. Teshima was expansive about “Tell Me More.” Some whites, such a  those at the Jacksonville station that canceled the show, view Michel Martin as “angry.” WDET in Detroit canceled Dyson show after president of the University of Michigan thought it didn’t fit in.

August

Amjad Atallah, bureau chief for Al Jazeera English for the Western Hemisphere. “You are all a great group to have dinner with!”

July

Askia Muhammad, WPFW-FM news director, provided a warts-and-all look at the station, which is hampered by lack of sufficient infrastructure to support the programming. He was a regular in the roundtable’s early days. Askia also writes for the Final Call and is a columnist for the Washington Informer, among other multimedia pursuits. He has his own Wikipedia entry:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Askia_Muhammad Show host Jared Ball said the session was therapeutic. Matt Thompson of NPR joined us, saying he knows nothing about radio but contributed a little background about what he’s doing with his Project ARGO, working with the local NPR stations. The project is a Knight Foundation/Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded effort to broaden the reach of public media by creating new websites at 13 public broadcasting outlets geared to a younger, more diverse audience.

June

Edward Schumacher-Matos, who started June 1 as ombudsman at NPR, and Jonathan Blakley, NPR foreign desk producer who is returning from Libya. He is believed to be one of only two African American journalists in Libya.

May

Anders Gyllenhaal, who came to town in November as vice president, news and Washington editor of the McClatchy Co. He has been editor of the Miami Herald, Raleigh News & Observer and Star Tribune in Minneapolis

April

Antoine Sanfuentes, new Washington bureau chief, NBC News (also an NBC News v.p.) and Ken Strickland, new deputy bureau chief. Antoine wrote afterward, “I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about what we do but also to be challenged on status quo. Great group of thinkers and the meal was much appreciated.”

March

Calvin Sims, journalism program officer, Ford Foundation, and former director, producer and foreign correspondent at the New York Times, seeking ideas as to how Ford could spend its money better to promote media diversity.

January

Bill Burton, deputy White House press secretary. He wrote afterward, “It was a real pleasure to join.  I told my wife when I got home that it is one of the very top events I’ve participated in during my short time at the White House.  I wish my dad could have been there — he would have really enjoyed the conversation.”

2010

December 2010 holiday party

Isabel Wilkerson discusses "The Warmth of Other Suns" at the first annual Jorunal-isms Holiday Party, at the home of Paul and Anita Delaney. Listening are, from left, Jason Miccolo johnson, Linda Shockley, Richard Prince, Jeannine Hunter, Latoya Peterson, Kevin Blackistone Photo (Credit: Craig Herndon)
Isabel Wilkerson discusses “The Warmth of Other Suns” at the first annual Journal-isms Holiday Party, at the home of Paul and Anita Delaney. Listening are, from left, Jason Miccolo Johnson, Linda Shockley, Richard Prince, Jeannine Hunter, Latoya Peterson, Kevin Blackistone. (Credit: Craig Herndon)

Isabel Wilkerson, former New York Times correspondent and author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” < http://bit.ly/2whFQLj >

November

Two journalists arriving from Detroit. Steven Gray, the only full-time resident of the house that Time Inc. bought in Detroit for a year-long reporting project. He is returning to D.C. for Time. Alex P. Kellogg is joining NPR as a reporter from the Detroit bureau of the Wall Street Journal. In 2007, when he was working for the Detroit Free Press, Alex wrote a piece about being an “African American” as Barack Obama’s racial bona fides were being questioned. His mother is white American and his father Eritrean. He worked as a journalist in East Africa for three years, mostly in Kenya. A 5,000-word essay he wrote on the irony of being black in America and yet closer to white in Africa was published in 2007 by the Sierra Club in an anthology of travel pieces entitled, “A Leaky Tent is a Place of Paradise.”

October
Arsalan Iftikhar, human rights lawyer/founder of TheMuslimGuy.com. It was Arsalan who alerted us to what would become a major blowup,  that Juan Williams told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly the previous night that he felt a certain unease when he saw people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes. “Muslim activists cried foul, a modest brawl ensued,” NPR’s “On the Media” reported . “It escalated into a full-on slam-dance when NPR, which employed Williams as a news analyst, fired him. Even a lot of the radio network’s insiders acknowledge today that management acted peremptorily, canning Williams without a hearing.” Williams launched a counterattack on NPR, calling for an end to its federal funding and writing a book, “Muzzled.” He landed at Fox News as a commentator.

September

Saturday brunch with Alison Bethel McKenzie, a member of our dinner group before she went overseas. She is now interim director of the International Press Institute, advocating for press freedom, in Vienna, Austria.

For our regular dinner, we commemorated We will commemorate Sonya Ross’ promotion to the new position of
race/ethnicity/demographics editor at the Associated Press. Also, Mark S. Luckie. new national innovations editor at the Washington Post, who comes from the Center for Investigative Reporting, where he was a multimedia producer, and is author of The Digital Journalist’Handbook; Corey Dade, who has returned to his hometown from the Wall Street Journal Atlanta bureau, joining NPR as a digital news correspondent. Jim Asendio, WAMU-FM news director, introduced WAMU’s new blogger, Anna John Peediyakkal, (known later just as Anna John), who is  part of Project ARGO, a Knight Foundation/Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded effort to broaden the reach of public media by creating new websites at 13 public broadcasting outlets geared to a younger, more diverse audience.  The WAMU site is called DCentric. Anna became a regular until her departure for the West Coast in 2017.

August

President Obama addresses the nation ending combat troops in Iraq. We try to watch. Doris Truong, president of the Asian American Journalists Association; Michele Salcedo, new president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; Adam Powell, who is returning to D.C. after having spent time on the Left Coast, at the University of Southern California, as vice provost for globalization; Corey Dade, Wall Street Journal reporter, who joins NPR in September as a Washington-based digital news correspondent covering a broad range of domestic issues. The group also saw President Bush announcing the beginning of the war in 2003, at Charlie Chiang’s on I Street.

July

Keach Hagey, recently arrived media writer for Politico, who worked at The National, a relatively new English-language newspaper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and before that the Village Voice; and her predecessor at Politico, Michael Calderone, who now breaks stories for Yahoo News

June

Previewing Joe Allbritton’s new local D.C. news site, TBD. General manager Jim Brady, formerly head of washingtonpost.com, and the editor, Erik Wemple, formerly editor of Washington City Paper. A story on their venture: http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4873 The venture was short-lived. Wemple left for the Washington Post in May 2011, when Politico wrote, “The site’s general manger, Jim Brady, left after only three months. In February, just over six months after its launch, the site shed about a third of its staff and shrank its mission to focus mostly on arts and entertainment. . . .”

 (Credit: Jason Miccolo Johnson)
May 2010 roundtable (Credit: Jason Miccolo Johnson)

May

With champagne, the roundtable congratulates Milton Coleman on becoming president of the American Society of News Editors; Walt Swanston on an award to be announced [the Ida B. Wells Award] and Paul Delaney on NABJ’s Lifetime Achievement Award. http://bit.ly/2rSXOiO

April

Dori J. Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, who is in town for the ASNE convention; Jason Miccolo Johnson, photographer at many events that we have attended; and Caroline Brewer, former editorial writer and columnist for the Record in Bergen County, N.J., and children’s book author, who is now in D.C. working as “a social entrepreneur/author and education consultant. The overflow crowd included Danielle Belton, the “Black Snob,” in her first appearance. We toasted Michael Days’ Pulitzer Prize for the Philadelphia Daily News. Richard Prince announced it was the first day for “Journal-isms” appearing on the Root, brought in a copy of the programs for David Mills’ funeral and for the McGruder Award for diversity advocacy from Kent State University.

March

Congratulating Rashod Ollison, who has just accepted a job as entertainment writer for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and will be departing Baltimore and his life as pop music critic for the Sun.

February

Keith Woods, who started on Feb. 1 as v.p. for  diversity at National Public Radio.

January

Jayson Blair, disgraced New York Times reporter. The headline for “Journal-isms” was,  “Jayson Blair Says Newsrooms Have Others Sick Like Him:  N.Y. Times Scandal Figure Meets With Black Journalists.”

Selected Earlier Roundtables 

2009

November

Donna Byrd, publisher of TheRoot.com, with editorial staffers Teresa Wiltz, Natalie Hopkinson and Terence Samuel.

October

Lisa Frazier Page, articles editor for the Washington Post magazine, who is seeking freelance pieces.  She also co-authored “A Mighty Long Way,” a new book on the Little Rock Nine. Danyel Smith, executive editor of TheRoot.com, was a no-show. We learned that she had resigned from The Root after six weeks, saying the commute from New York was a problem.

September

Garrett Graff, new editor of the Washingtonian magazine. He picked up the tab! Jackie Jones emailed later, ” You have created a mobile salon, Richard. It’s going to become a highly sought after  invitation.”  Also, Carl Chancellor, formerly of the Akron Beacon Journal, new to
the area.

August

Querry Robinson, who books guests for MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

July

Keith Brown, senior vice president of BET News & Public Affairs, who came down from New York.

June

Jose Antonio Vargas, who covers the intersection of politics and technology for the Washington Post. We discussed what he’s working on (a movie project on AIDS, more stories); how he got his job; how he came into journalism — deciding to minor in Black studies at San Francisco State after the O.J. Simpson murder trial; newsroom attitudes toward New Media (he writes about how people use new technology, not about  the technology itself (some older people think that all you have to do is drop “Facebook” and “Twitter” into conversations to be “with it”); covering
the presidential campaign; and being Filipino and thus neither Black nor white.
See:  http://www.joseantoniovargas.com/  

May

Celebrating Gene Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary and Mireille Grangeois’s new job as publisher of the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

March

Sharon Farmer, who was Bill Clinton’s photographer in the White House and went on to work for AP.

February

10th anniversary celebration of our roundtable, at the home of Paul and Anita Delaney < http://bit.ly/2IzX48n >

2008

November

The Trotter Group of African American columnists was meeting this year in Washington at the Capital Hilton. Our two groups mingled in the hotel lobby.

October

Ron Nixon of the New York Times talked about his trip to Rwanda, Congo and Ethiopia, with a segue into DNA testing for ancestry. Karen Howze, D.C. Superior Court judge and former journalist, talked about the court system as it applies to abused kids, which is her bailiwick.

September

Toren Beasley, laid off as managing editor of Newhouse News Service but who set up his own graphics firm, led a discussion of  journalists’ place in the new media environment. One possibility is news cooperatives set up by journalists who left their news organizations, such as minnpost.com Black journalists could start something like that.

July

Jeanne Fox-Alston,  vice president for talent management and diversity at the Newspaper Association of America (the publishers); Warren Leary, who is taking a buyout from the New York Times Washington bureau, where he has been a longtime science writer; Dwight Cunningham, veteran journalist and previous dinner guest who  has returned to D.C.;  and Ron Nixon, computer assisted reporting guru who is now in the New York Times Washington bureau.

March

Leonard Pitts Jr. , syndicated Miami Herald columnist. Topics were the revelation that  New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer was a customer of a high-priced call-girl ring, the continuing Democratic primary campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

February

Staff of theroot.com, which launched on Jan. 28: Donna Byrd, publisher; Lynette Clemetson, managing editor; Terence Samuel, deputy editor; Natalie Hopkinson, associate editor. In addition, Sam Fulwood of the Plain Dealer will be coming in from Cleveland and Jack White from Richmond. Both have written for theRoot.com.

2007

November

Jonathan Capehart, editorial writer at the  Washington Post, by way of Bloomberg and the New York Daily News. At Las Canteras at 2307 18th St. NW in Adams Morgan. Gary Lee, who just left the Washington Post as a travel writer, is co-owner of the restaurant and was our host.

October

Tony Marcano, supervising senior editor at “Weekend Edition Saturday,” his wife, Denice Rios, who did a brief stint as an editor on “Tell Me More,” and Beverly Davis, an attorney for NPR who is new to town

August

Wendell Goler, White House correspondent for Fox News, who will be a questioner at an upcoming presidential debate, and Robbie Morganfield, who has just left the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute in Nashville, where he was executive director, to come to  D.C. to pursue a Ph.D. and become the new executive director/minister of  Shaw Community Ministry, a nonprofit that offers after-school and other programming to youths and their families living in the Shaw area of D.C.

July

Darius Walker of CNN, our guest in December 2004 at Kelly’s Ellis Island in Northeast, is leaving town to become CNN’s bureau chief, assisting the executive VP of CNN worldwide, in New York.
May

Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post, authors of the new biography of Clarence Thomas, “Supreme Discomfort.” Here is the Web site: http://www.supremediscomfort.com/index.htm

April

Sonya Ross of the Associated Press. She passed out a list she’d compiled of the newspapers with the highest percentage of blacks and said we should mentor some of them; she also listed percentages at some of the big papers.

March

Our dinner partner Alison Bethel is leaving Legal Times at the end of the month to accept a job in Nassau, Bahamas, as managing editor, the top news job, at The Nassau Guardian, the result of a conversation at our dinner a couple of months ago. We also welcomed columnist and editorial writer Betty Baye of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

February

Ralph Everett of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, with his new communications director, Lynne Adrine, formerly of ABC News. Perry Bacon Jr., who is moving from the Time D.C. bureau to the Washington Post.

January

Jack White came up from Richmond and Ron Harris down from Baltimore as we returned to Kelly’s Ellis Island to watch the Florida primary results on CNN. Kellys’ set us up in a room with a television. John McCain won the GOP primary, defeating Rudy Guiliani .

2006

December

Caryn Mathes, general manager of WAMU-FM, an NPR affiliate

October

Gary Younge, a black Briton who covers the United States as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian of London. He was at the Washington Post in 1996 on a Larry Stern fellowship, and while there met his future wife, Tara Mack, a Post reporter and member of the National Association of Black Journalists. He has a new book, a collection of his pieces about being in the States, “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

September

Jake Oliver, publisher of the Afro-American newspapers in Washington and Baltimore.  “I had a GREAT TIME!!  Thanks for inviting me.  It was great meeting exciting news people — I thought you said they were ‘old’?” [as in “old heads.”]

May

A’Lelia Bundles, author of “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker,” and former journalist at ABC News and NBC News; Jack White, retired Time magazine columnist who is moving to Richmond, Va., Roger Wilkins, former Washington Post and New York Times editorial writer and history professor at George Mason University, and William Rice, professor emeritus at Albany State University in Albany, Ga., and father of roundtable regular Yanick Rice Lamb of Howard University.

April

Wendi Thomas, a member of the Trotter Group of African American columnists, who has become metro columnist at the Baltimore Sun. She later backed out and returned to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis.

February

The Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, formerly of USA Today and Chicago Tribune, and now minister as well as columnist for the National Newspaper Publishers Association (black press), and Rhonda Stewart, who has just arrived in D.C. from Boston, where she was an arts reporter at the Boston Globe. She is now assistant editor at Jazz Times in Silver Spring.  Barbara had collaborated with Coretta Scott King, who died Jan. 30 at 78. In 2017, Barbara spoke at the Newseum about “My Life, My Love, My Legacy,” the autobiography of Coretta King that Barbara completed.

2005

September

Since Steve Holmes was on the Washington Post’s assigning and editing team for Hurricane Katrina coverage, and Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had spent four days in the Astrodome, the trading of information about the hurricane aftermath was informed as well as lively. We welcomed Ron to town; he’s joined the Washington bureau. Steve has also returned, having joined the Post from the New York Times.

August

Lively conversations about John H. Johnson and life at Johnson Publishing Co., as well as coverage. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, died Aug. 8 at age 87. Richard Prince covered the funeral in Chicago. < http://bit.ly/2IBupDV >

June

Jamil Muhammad is one of the national spokespeople for the Nation of Islam and edits the editorial page of the Final Call He is a Howard grad (’81) and grew up in D.C. among other places. He was the focus of much of the discussion as we discussed Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and the Nation, and Farrakhan’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Nashville in 1986. Muahmmad allowed as how Farrakhan might have done things differently after Vanessa Williams said that Farrakhan alienated people who had helped give the Million Man March credibility by calling us “slaves.” Amy Alexander, new in town, had written a collection of essays on Farrakhan, “The Farrakhan Factor.”

April

Karen DeWitt, new D.C. editor of the Washington Examiner

March

Leon Dash, University of Illinois professor and former Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporter, who is in town; the two black reporters at the Washington Examiner, Andrei Blakely and Rahkia Nance

February

The esteemed Roger Wilkins, raconteur, activist, history professor and once and future journalist

January

Deborah Heard, new assistant managing editor for Style at the Washington Post.

2004

December

Darius Walker, senior director,  news coverage, CNN, Washington bureau, who came to town in June from New York. There, he was honored by with the Trailblazer award from the New York chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. “It was truly a pleasure to spend time with such a spirited group of people.”

August

Steve Holmes of the New York Times Washington bureau

July

Bill Marimow and Walter Watson of NPR. Walt Swanston, then director of diversity management at NPR, explained: “As you know, we are adding 45 new jobs in the newsroom beginning in the fall. Bill (the former Baltimore Sun editor who is NPR’s new managing editor) wants our help in getting out the word because he understands that this offers NPR a perfect opportunity to add people of color and new beats. The other person is Walter Watson, the executive producer of NPR’s weekend All Things Considered. He’s African American, has been at the NPR for 17 years and is a brilliant young man. Some of us will be working for him one day.”

2003

September

Jamie Foster, news director at WJLA-TV, who came from Dallas, and Ivan Roman, executive director of the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists, who arrives in town after being San Juan bureau chief of the Orlando Sentinel. Also, Phil Dixon, chair of the Howard U. journalism department, Keith Alexander of the Washington Post, president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists, and Roxanne Evans, who was a columnist in Austin for the American-Statesman.

August

Samuel F. Yette, who is retired now after a career that includes being fired from Newsweek, teaching journalism at Howard from 1972 to 1986 and writing the classic “The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America” (1971).

July

Simeon Booker of Jet magazine was our guest on July 21, 2003. It led to a “Washington Whispers” item in Jet! Roundtable members contributed to a “Scoop” award scholarship for a promising Howard U. journalism student. We told Mr. Booker about that and it ended up on Page 10 of the next Jet<http://bit.ly/2BSYSWu >. Ashanti was on the cover. Troy Dante Prestwood, the recipient, is now an Advisory Neighborhood Commission member.

2002

September

Adam Powell III, who is busy reshaping things as general manager of Howard University Television. Also, Wil Haygood, formerly of the Boston Globe, latest addition to the Washington Post Style staff. Wil is also the author of “King of the Cats,” on Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and “The Haygoods of Columbus,” about his family, and a forthcoming bio of Sammy Davis Jr.

2001

September

A lively crowd, with Al Fitzpatrick, interim dean at Howard University,  and Jack White. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a round table, and the restaurant reneged on a promise to approximate one. The result was two groups of conversations going on: One with Al, Jack, Flo Purnell and me and sometimes Paul Delaney; the other, mostly women at the other end of the table: Jessica Lee, Alice Bonner, Jessica’s friend Pat, Yanick Rice Lamb and Walt Swanston.

More:

2020: https://www.journal-isms.com/2020/01/journal-isms-roundtable-2020/
2019: https://www.journal-isms.com/2019/04/journal-isms-roundtable-2019/
2018: https://www.journal-isms.com/2018/05/journal-isms-roundtable-2018/
2017: https://www.journal-isms.com/?p=15468&preview=true
2016: https://www.journal-isms.com/?p=15471&preview=true
2015: https://www.journal-isms.com/?p=15492&preview=true
2014: https://www.journal-isms.com/?p=15478&preview=true

A sample of photos from July 30, 2018, by George Dalton Tolbert IV:

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Bonita Bing, Oct. 23, 2018
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